The physical scars on the left arm of inmate Melanie C. Ward are only a small part of the pain and suffering resulting from her 10 year battle heroin addiction. Ward, of Bainbridge Township, is currently serving time in the Lake County Jail stemming from a burglary sentence as the result of her heroin addiction.

Euclid Police Lt. Scott Meyer is all too familiar with the outlines of what’s now being called a “heroin epidemic.’’
So are Lt. Roger Watkins and Sgt. Tom Nimon of the Lorain Police Department.
Meyer, Watkins and Nimon work the narcotics and vice beat.
They are on the streets of their cities watching for tell-tale indicators of heroin deals about to go down.
“To trained law enforcement officers, they are so easy to spot,’’ Meyer said.
Most of the buyers are white suburbanites.
In Euclid, buyers often are from the eastern suburbs.
“(Buyers) sit around on side streets and in parking lots, waiting for dealers to show up,’’ Meyer said.
Meyer said that in a month where 20 to 25 heroin use arrests are made in Euclid, 15 to 20 of the individuals arrested typically are from Lake and Geauga counties.
In Lorain, buyers tend to be from western Cuyahoga, Lorain, Erie and Huron counties.
“Lorain is a distribution center for heroin,” Nimon said. “We have a lot of people from Avon, Avon Lake, Amherst, all the surrounding communities, coming here to buy their product. There are a lot of (heroin) users in (the city of) Lorain, but in the past couple years, we see more suburban kids coming in than we ever have.”
The three detectives are convinced suburbanites choose their cities to make buys because they feel more comfortable there, and safer, than they would in predominantly inner-city locales.
Most of the sellers are young black men from Cleveland and Northeast Ohio’s other urban centers.
Deals are made quickly, often with both parties never leaving their vehicles.
Although some dealers sell small doses of heroin for as little as $10, most buyers are handing over $80 to $100 for a half-gram or $160 to $180 for a gram.
What happens after the transaction is completed depends on how acutely the buyer is “fiending’’ for the next fix.
The detectives say it isn’t uncommon for buyers to go somewhere close by afterward to “cook’’ the granular heroin into liquid form before injecting themselves with a hypodermic needle.
“The heroin user is the cause of a huge number of calls coming in to the police from our residents,’’ Meyer said. “You don’t want your kids outside while hand-to-hand drug deals are being made on the street.
“This is not acceptable to our city and its residents. It puts Euclid in a bad light and takes away our residents’ quality of living.’’
Nimon reported similar calls coming in to Lorain police.
“I’ve been in narcotics 20 for years and I’ve never seen it this bad,’’ Nimon said.
“We dealt with heroin 20 years ago, but it wasn’t so spread out into the suburbs. And we didn’t have so many people dying.”
In recent weeks, there were three overdose deaths in Lorain County and four in Cuyahoga County.
Since 2011, 1,800 deaths in Ohio were attributed to overdoses of heroin or other opioids.

‘The craving’
Melanie C. Ward stood in front of Judge Joseph Gibson in Lake County Common Pleas Court last month after pleading guilty to felony counts of burglary and possession of heroin.
The 29-year-old Painesville resident was sentenced to 60 days in jail and three years of probation.
Ward also was ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution to the victims of the burglary and undergo treatment for her heroin addiction in the jail and at NorthEast Ohio Community Alternative Program.
“She has so much potential. She wasn’t supposed to be there,’’ Gibson said of Ward a few hours after handing down the sentence.
During an interview in the Lake County Jail, Ward said it was her addiction to heroin and the need to raise money to fuel her habit that moved her to burglarize the home of people she knew.
“I was very, very dopesick. I was desperate,’’ Ward said. “It’s the craving that takes over your soul. You don’t have a conscience anymore. You don’t care who you hurt in the process.’’
Ward, a 2002 graduate of Kenston High School, remembered being a “nerdy kid in middle school’’ who paid little or no heed when speakers came into classrooms to warn of the perils of drug use.
“I got As and Bs in school, ran cross country and took a photography class. I would never stick a needle in my arm or steal anything from anybody,’’ Ward said.
By the time she was in high school, though, Ward was on a potentially dangerous path.
“I smoked a lot of weed, started drinking at 18 and took pain pills for tension headaches,’’ Ward said. “The painkillers were always the main thing. I got a buzz from them that was different from alcohol or marijuana.’’
Ward said despite being accepted to a number of colleges, she decided to take a year off after graduating from high school. She wanted to experience life, play music and join friends on a cross-country trip to British Columbia.
While working for a telemarketing company in Kent, Ward struck up a friendship with a co-worker who suggested she experiment with heroin.
Ward agreed to snort a line of heroin. Her life has been in a downward spiral ever since.
“I was mentally addicted to it right away,” Ward said. “It was a weekend thing for a month or so, then I started shooting — using every day.’’
Initially obtaining heroin in Kent and Akron, Ward soon shifted her buys to Euclid and Cleveland. Her usual places for “picking up’’ were along East 185th Street and Euclid Avenue in Euclid, as well as Eddy Road in Cleveland.
“It was cheaper there and we got better stuff,’’ Ward said.
Ward was spending $500 to $600 a week to support her heroin habit.
“There was a group of six of us using, musicians and indy-rock hipsters. We had jobs and were functioning addicts. There was no stealing involved at that point. I really minimized what I was doing — rationalized it.’’
Two years after her heroin addiction began, with help from her father, Ward got into a treatment program. Attending meetings at Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, she stayed clean for about a year and a half before relapsing.
“You think missing a meeting or two a week wouldn’t make a difference, but it does. I should have been going every night,’’ Ward said.
In the seven years since then, Ward said she got into treatment programs “at least four times.’’ Every time, she relapsed.
With the cost of supporting her habit rising to upwards of $1,000 per week, Ward began shoplifting to generate quick cash for heroin purchases in Euclid, Cleveland or, if supplies temporarily dried up there, Lorain and Elyria.
“The stuff is everywhere,’’ Ward said.
She stole everything from toiletries to designer jeans, gift cards and prime steaks, re-selling those items to stores or individuals for fractions of their listed prices.
“Sometimes, I wouldn’t even bother cutting off the price tags. At the end, I got very sloppy. That’s why I’m in here,’’ Ward said, looking around the tiny cell in Lake County Jail.
The worst of it, Ward said, was squandering a $100,000 inheritance from her grandparents. She said she spent upwards of $60,000 of that money, and probably more, to buy heroin.
“They gave me money to better myself, and I used it to take myself into the ground,’’ Ward said.
Ward has been behind bars and cut off from heroin since her arrest in July.
“Three-quarters of the women in this jail are heroin addicts,’’ she said.
Lake County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Frank Leonbruno said the Lake County Jail’s capacity is 350 inmates. Earlier this month, Leonbruno said its population is at 430, a spike that is attributable to heroin arrests and heroin-related theft cases.

Changed landscape
The steep rise in the number of heroin users living outside of big cities has law enforcement agencies taking a regional approach to interdicting the flow of heroin.
Steven M. Dettelbach, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, pointed to three recent rounds of arrests that yielded over 100 indictments against drug traffickers based in Northeast Ohio.
The Northern Ohio Law Enforcement Task Force, a consortium of agencies that includes the Euclid Police, was credited with doing the investigative work that led to 92 of those indictments.
“From the standpoint of the huge amounts of heroin being funneled into Northeast Ohio, it’s an unprecedented problem,’’ Dettelbach said.
“This heroin epidemic is affecting not just the core cities, but also the suburbs and rural areas.’’
Lake County Sheriff Daniel A. Dunlap isn’t surprised that suburbanites are caught in the middle of this latest surge of heroin use.
“I’m not a social scientist, but some people are under the misconception that, all of a sudden, suburban kids are using heroin,’’ Dunlap said. “The major buyers of drugs for years have been suburban kids. They have the money.’’
Coroners in Lake, Geauga and Lorain counties also attest to heroin’s potentially lethal effect on users.
Dr. Lynn Smith of Lake County said he has 14 heroin overdose deaths on the books this year, up from six in 2012.
In Geauga County, Dr. Robert S. Coleman said he has recorded 10 heroin overdose deaths since 2010. Coleman estimated that 50 to 60 Geauga County residents have succumbed to heroin overdoses outside the county during that span.
Dr. Stephen B. Evans said after recording 60 heroin overdose deaths last year in Lorain County, he expects this year’s total to be between 70 and 75.
“If people still think drug deaths are happening mostly in the inner city, they are uninformed or delusional,’’ Evans said.
“Most of my drug deaths in the last year have been people from the suburbs. We’re losing young people with fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters, husbands and wives. It’s a tragedy.’’

About the Author

David has been a full-time writer with The News-Herald since 1984. He write about news, sports and entertainment, He served as president of the Television Critics Association from 1993-95. Reach the author at dglasier@News-Herald.com
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